Presenting the Great New Features of WordPress 3.1

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Folks at WordPress have just released WordPress 3.1 (Code name “Reinhardt”), 14th version of World’s most famous and award-winning publishing software. This release has some fantabulous features like Internal Linking and a WordPress.com styled admin bar on front end which makes it very easy to visit most used features of back-end. Read on to have an overview of some major features of this release.

Internal Linking

We can’t stress enough on the importance of Internal linking for SEO of your WordPress blog. To be honest, the process of Internal linking was pretty painful unless you would use some plugins or hacks to find relevant posts for internal linking. With WordPress 3.1 this is a breeze now. WordPress now have built-in functionality to link your new content with already published content. Below is a screenshot of this kick-ass functionality.

I’ve updated my personal blog and I have to say I’m in love with it.

Admin Bar

If you visit WordPress.com as a logged-in user, you will see a bar at top of page which gives you shortcuts to important and most used areas of backend. With WordPress 3.1, you can enjoy the same functionality on self hosted blogs ;)

However if you don’t like this functionality, you can always disable it by going to your user profile.

Admin area Tweaks

Ajaxification: Latest version of WordPress also has improved the posts area too with Ajaxification. You don’t have to reload pages while searching for posts. Also you can go to specific page number by entering page number itself in Posts admin area. Below is a video for this functionality to even describe it better.

Overhauled Blue Theme of Admin area is also included in this release which looks stunning, a pretty good job done by UX team of WordPress.

Now we will cover new functionality from developer’s point of view.

Post Formats

Battle between WordPress and Tumblr is an open secret. Both of them have been trying to grab each other’s user base. Here at 1wd we are die-hard fans of WordPress and I am not reluctant in saying that I’m biased towards WordPress :) With these new Post formats, WordPress provides you out of the box functionality for creating and styling different type of posts i.e links,chat,photo etc.

Here is a pretty good write-up on post formats by core contributor of WordPress, Otto.

An Even Better CMS

WordPress 3.1 allows you to create advanced taxonomies and call custom field queries.Result of which is WordPress is even better and comprehensive CMS. Matt Mullenweg, Founder of WordPress summed up this pretty well in release post of 3.1.

There’s a bucket of candy for developers as well, including our new Post Formats support which makes it easy for themes to create portable tumblelogs with different styling for different types of posts, new CMS capabilities like archive pages for custom content types, a new Network Admin, an overhaul of the import and export system, and the ability to perform advanced taxonomy and custom fields queries.

With the 3.1 release, WordPress is more of a CMS than ever before. The only limit to what you can build is your imagination.

Here is a list of complete features and changelog in WordPress 3.1. All these exciting changes demand that you should upgrade your WordPress right now :D with no time delay. This update is available in your dashboard and you can download it as well from here

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Comments

Nice information. The way you described is really cool and helpful . However WordPress 3.1.2 has already been released. It’s also so cool for its features . But one thing is certain that WordPress used to be used as blogging purpose but now it has crossed the limit . Now-a-days many web concerns are using it as CMS .

Just thought I would share what I found on Disabling Comments on Pages
1. Go to whatever page you want to edit.
2. Click “screen options” in the upper right corner.
3. Check the box “discussions” so it shows up at the bottom like it used to.
Thanks WordPress, for wasting an hour of my time!! =)

I LOVE, love, love the new internal linking feature. The only downside is that you can link the keywords you already typed; can’t just look up a post you’d like to add as “read more here” kind of thing.

WordPress tends to make things very simple and user friendly. I has to be one of the fastest and easiest installs and upgrades out there. That admin top menu bar is a little annoying glad it is easy to disable. I was trying to figure out how to turn it off on a site, nice to see it is just a simple tick of a box.

I had a problem when upgrading to WP3.1 with the Admin SSL plugin. I thought the upgrade had totally screwed my site as it just gave a white screen but when I looked at the logs it was the Admin SSL plugin, I suspect it is not compatible. It also broke some of my plugins but they were fixed fairly easily.

The internal linking feature is a fantastic addition in my opinion. Google loves sites that have a good internal linking structure and this makes it easier to add them so it must be a good thing.

It is interesting that Matt Mullenweg is talking more and more about WordPress being more than a Blogging platform. I suspect with some of the changes made they are trying to move WordPress more and more into the CMS market, which is a good thing, I use it as a basis for most of my sites now and anythign that helps with that is always a bonus.

Upgraded, and then panicked when my custom fields section disappeared. If you have some things missing when you are creating a post, click on “Screen Options” in the top right. For some reason mine were turned off by default after I upgraded. If not for Google, I don’t think I would have thought to click on that.

One thing I’m very annoyed about: where can I disable the comments on the pages now? Usually you could simply click the box and you wouldn’t allow comments on a static page. This is gone and I have those nasty comment boxes on EVERY page. This is a big step back into the old blog world. I use WordPress for websites, not so much for blogs and need to disable the comments on pages (not on posts).

I installed this update yesterday and have really noticed an increase in speed on my Admin pages.
I live in the sticks and my broadband connection is poor at best.
Previously, when updating my WP site, it was a case of – click – wait – click – wait etc

Now’s it’s almost bearable. My fault for living in the middle of nowhere but all the same a very worthwhile update!

I like it a lot. On my site the admin screens seem to be a bit snappier and while I don’t have a theme that supports post formats yet, I like the idea and I may modify the theme I currently use in order to do this.

I had a tumblr but there’s something about it that doesn’t encourage the writing of long form posts in the way that WordPress does. I have a wp blog in order to write in a long form more often, though it will be nice to be able to drop in the odd artefact now and then to break up the flow of posts.

Unfortunately the update has broken categories for my site, it simply shows all my posts when I click on a single category link. As a result I am reticent about embracing post formats just yet.

I’m not going to complain too bitterly though, it is one of those things that sometimes happens with upgrades. It is either unintentional and it will be fixed in a patch shortly; or I’ll have to fix it myself and I’ll get a “How I fixed it” post out of it at least! Unless someone else works it out before me and writes one first!